Child Abuse Workers Call For Curbs On Hotline

At least 35 percent of calls to Florida's child abuse hotline are inaccurate, off-the-wall or simply can't be proved, a national expert says.

But the state's wide-open acceptance policy nevertheless forces investigators to check all of them out.

That policy, a legacy of the state's sensitivity over past child deaths codified in the 1999 Child Protection Act, has created an avalanche of formal abuse reports -- more than 180,000 last year.

The enormous workload, 59,000 reports larger than the previous year, is burying investigators, say local child welfare managers. The plaint is echoed by Richard Gelles, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Children's Policy, Practice and Research, who just completed a yearlong review of Florida's abuse hotline.

The review, mandated by the state law, revealed hotline counselors rarely reject calls, even those that fail to meet the state's criteria for an abuse report. Counselors are accepting calls outside the Department of Children & Families jurisdiction, those where the child cannot be located, and those that point out a family's financial or social woes rather than signs of child abuse.

"The hotline is supposed to be a gate," Gelles said. "They've got the gate rusted, stuck open."

Children & Families officials, who run the hotline, disagree. They say they're following state law and accepting calls that meet Florida statute. They say they reject between 25 percent and 30 percent of calls that don't meet the criteria.

They attribute the constant influx of reports to increased productivity among the hotline staff and changes in the law -- which require the hotline to accept calls from mandated reporters such as judges, police officers and teachers.

Reports are passed to the 15 local districts to investigate. And many of those districts say they're swamped because the hotline isn't carefully screening calls.

"There's a sense the system has overwhelmed itself by taking on too much of everything," said George Atkinson, program administrator for the Broward County Sheriff's Office's child protective investigative unit. The Sheriff's Office took over child abuse investigations from the state Department of Children & Families a year ago.

Local caseloads grow

Last year, Broward was swamped with more than 15,700 reports, according to Children & Families' fiscal year data. Typically, abuse or neglect is verified in about half of all reports, said Cheryl Stopnick, a Broward Sheriff's Office spokeswoman.

In Palm Beach County, 35 percent of more than 10,000 reports led to clear cases of abuse or neglect.

The danger, Gelles and others say, is that more files on investigators' desks mean less attention given to each case, creating a greater chance a child truly at risk of abuse or neglect will slip through an investigator's fingers.

"While that's well-intended, to look at more situations, if the end result is that you wind up with 50,000 cases in your backlog statewide, you have to say, `Well, did I get a benefit out of this or did I create another set of risks?'" Atkinson said.

Gelles thinks Florida is courting danger by accepting 95 percent of the calls to the hotline and turning them into reports to be investigated.

"I equate that to the game of playing Russian roulette," he said. "It's just a matter of time before some child in the backlog pool is really badly injured."

"The demands on the job have increased, like, tenfold," said Lynn Boughner, family safety program operations administrator for the Department of Children & Families in Palm Beach County.

"I've been an investigator back prior to our current system; I never had a child die on me. I would say pretty much I did a lot of the same steps people do now but you didn't have a million pieces of paper to fill out or a computer facing you every day. ...

"Maybe they've added more people but they've added more cases, more complex cases; it just seems like this cycle we can't get out of."

As a first step to relieving some of that caseload bloat, child welfare managers -- and Gelles -- would like to see tighter screening of calls accepted by hotline workers.

"I've never seen the necessity of making someone wear the scarlet letter A and be investigated only to be offered voluntary services," Gelles said of the typical outcome of most child abuse investigations. "It just doesn't seem right to use the child welfare system as the social services safety net."

Also, workers often get pulled in to reinvestigate closed cases, Atkinson said.